From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <9e3065a5e5e787ac6be58466225cc0a7@swtch.com>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] Re: acme mail
From: "Russ Cox" <rsc@swtch.com>
Date: Mon, 20 Feb 2006 14:18:47 +0000
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I looked into this.  Whenever mail is delivered on Plan 9,
any embedded From lines are quoted with an extra leading
space.

The upas/fs raw and rawunix files show the raw disk format
(the rawunix one includes a leading From line), which 
includes the quoting.  Arguably the raw file should not quote
embedded From lines, but rawunix definitely should.  

The formatted body file should remove the leading space but
it does not.  No one has ever cared enough.

Acme mail just copies the unixheader and raw files into the
new mailbox.  It should be using rawunix, but I'm sure rawunix
came after the acme mail code.

All this applies to Plan 9 mail delivery.  The imap4 and pop3
pieces of upas/fs do not quote From lines in downloaded 
message bodies, and that inconsistency is the problem in
this case.  The fix is to make pop3 and imap4 quote From lines
in their message bodies (pretty easy in both cases) just like
upas/fs will find in regular Plan 9 mail boxes.

Separately, one might be motivated to try to unquote From
lines in the raw and body files. 

Russ